Cafes & Wineries

Howard Schultz says coffee chain has seen slight improvement in October. Also, Starbucks announces partnership with Red organization to eliminate AIDS in Africa.

By Melissa Allison

Seattle Times business reporter

Starbucks’ business may have bottomed in the fiscal quarter ended Sept. 30, chief executive Howard Schultz told reporters during the company’s leadership conference in New Orleans,

Original post by Robert

I’ve been passing an evening thinking about the Italian man and his obsession with women. Older men with younger women, younger men with older women, young men with young women, mature men with mature women. You name the combination there are scores of Italian men this very moment obsessing on a woman somewhere.

One of the attractions is the sheer pleasure of thinking about this subject. Whenever I talk to my fellow friends, it seems that whatever the age, and whatever their marital status, the conversation eventually heads into woman territory. Maybe the Italians are oversexed or just easily aroused, what does it matter? It just is.

When venturing along the wine trail in Italy, sooner or later, wine runs into women. And vice versa. After all, wine is romantic. Wine is the lubricant for love. Or a catalyst for lust. Maybe that is why wine is so doggone indispensable.

Look at a young couple as they are falling in love. What do they do? They linger over a bottle of wine, or two. Lubricant or catalyst, wine has a place in the course of romance.

What are some of the wines we men see as more effective than hormones? Which are the corks to pop that lead beyond the barrel room to the boudoir? After a scientific polling of a handful of male friends (the committee), here are a few wines that have been very successful in their pursuit of amorous adventures. Mind you, this is research and as such has been carefully compiled and recorded for posterity.

The first step is bubbly. Be it Champagne or Franciacorta, Prosecco or Cava, nothing succeeds faster than bubbles. Our committee has chosen a rosé Franciacorta for the sparkling representative. And while Champagne is ultimately a very classy choice, Franciacorta suggests subtlety and the slow dance to the “chambre”.

Rosé for the light onion skin color, similar to the object of one of the groups’ fascination. Dim lighting, soft music, little or no food (keep the senses alert) and moving the object of affection closer to the web. Not yet time for Rossini, patience. Just a little light chamber music, maybe a twelve string guitar with slow, calm melodies. And let the wine fill the emptiness and prepare the way.

For the second act, my consulting group suggested we move towards red wine, higher in alcohol and a little headier stuff. The dew is off the lily, the excitement of newness is behind us now. And while we must still act like we are interested in romance, are we not men? We want one thing. Always. One way or another. Or so the women always tell us. Embrace the archetype, is the counsel of the committee. And nothing embraces the archetype better than a bottle of Chianti. We’re in stage two, not time to bring out the big guns, the Aglianicos and the Amarones. Just a little classico, sans fiasco.

Act three, we wander into la donna è mobile country. Time for power, richness, whelm and overwhelm. Long arias, lengthy and more time-consuming. So we will be needing something from Piemonte. A blend of Nebbiolo and Barbera or possibly even some of the dreaded Cabernet. Coppo in Piemonte makes a red wine called Alter Ego, a Cabernet/Barbera red which is plush and concentrated. More than a sipping wine, so have some food for the poor dear, don’t starve her. Don’t worry; there will be plenty of time for Brachetto and dessert, after midnight. Just let Verdi work his magic along with Coppo’s concoction.

Too late for an overture, but maybe time for a sorbetto. Freshen things up a bit. Spruce up the place. Nothing too sweet, maybe slightly bitter, something that will move into the romantic realm, but not too blatant. Time for a white wine? I would go with a Fiano with a little age on it, that way you could be a little philosophical while you are spinning your web around your little drosophila. And with something like a Fiano, or even a higher level Soave, there will be ample alcohol to divert the object of your attention from the main objective. All the while the parties are experiencing a wonderful wine and so if the finale doesn’t result in what you had planned, all is not lost. But most likely you will succeed. And still not veer too far off the wine trail in Italy.

Sometimes it just seems that it will never lead to what you have been desiring, like going to see La Bohème and arriving to the opera on the night they were staging Gilbert and Sullivan. But if you should persevere and be patient, then you will be rewarded. Life, love and loss, all part of the cuvee of a grand wine. For this act, we thought it could only be staged with a sultry Amarone. And not a small player but something that makes a statement, like a Viviani or a Le Ragose, Cavalchina or if possible, a Dal Forno. One in the group thought a night with a bottle of Amarone could persuade even the most bitter and cold-hearted woman. Not that any in that group would ever attempt to scale a peak in the depths of the Underworld. Call it overkill to overshoot the mark and reach the goal. Sound cynical? Cold? Calculating? Were not talking vodka martinis, that would be cold and calculating. No, Amarone is powerfully persuasive but classically romantic.

Wild passionate one night stand? Bizet’s Carmen and a powerful and volatile Sicilian red, what else. Something like the Lamuri from Tasca or the Cadetto from La Lumia. This is wine to drink in a moment of passion before the sun rises, and to be gone before she awakens. Brandishing swords and swashbuckling and a climactic though far too soon lowering of the curtains.

Next, mixing it up. Some in our group had variations on a theme in mind, so to humor them; we all team worked the wine for that occasion. Sexy but not vulgar. One of us really wanted to propose a southern dessert wine, a passito. Another suggested keeping it a little lighter, maybe a moscato d’asti. But neither of those ideas really clicked. And then one of the geniuses in this brain trust hit upon the idea of a little known white wine from Lazio. Coenobium, a blend of Verdicchio, Grechetto and Trebbiano, organically farmed and made into wine by Cistercian nuns. Sexy? Oh yes, this is a white wine masquerading as a red wine of little color, a pigmentless wine with plenty of stroke. Did I really say that? And while there is the monastic craft of the wine, there is a communal pleasure that the wine delivers. Nuff said? Now I’m really going to hell.

Where is Puccini when you really need him? Waiting in the wings, for the finale with that sweet little bottle of wine? But this is no time for Moscato or Passito. This might be the last time, so why not take down a bottle of the stuff legends are made of? I will need to go back to one of my posts and plagiarize myself.
“Sagrantino passito from Antonelli San Marco in Montefalco. It is one of the primal wines of central Italy.”

“Lights down, music to a low chant, with only the heat from the candles. Once inside, the wine turned my palate towards the pagan. We had landed in Xanadu: the sacred river, the pleasure dome, the caverns measureless to man and the sunless sea. The milk of Paradise. “

“What to do with such a wine? if a dessert is needed, go to your local church and pilfer some of the communion hosts, pre-sanctified. Dip them in a wild honey and dust them with cinnamon. If you must have the Body to go with the Blood.”

All the while Verdi’s Nabucco plays into the morning towards its meeting of destiny with the rising sun.

Romance is so exhausting – Nessun Dorma – Bona Notte

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

I look up to journalists. I really do. They actually get paid for doing what I play at here every day, and most of them are way better at it than I am. But every once in a while someone publishes a story that makes me wonder how we all manage to avoid riding journalists out of town on a rail.

Witness the headlines that are rapidly rocketing their way across the internet: Heavy Metals Found in Wine, Metals in wine may be health danger, and Euro wines carrying potentially dangerous levels of heavy metals.

If this is really true, then most of the people I know are going to start dropping dead any day now. If it is not true, then this is some of the most irresponsible, flagrantly fear-mongering journalism I have seen in a long time.

I have every reason to believe it is the latter.

First, an overview of the story: scientists at Kingston University in London have done some analysis (here’s their paper for those inclined to read it) that seems to suggest that wines are much higher in various heavy metals than suspected, and that those levels, according to these researchers, exceed safety thresholds to the point of being a health concern.

But there is more to the story than this. This story originated at the pinnacle of respectable journalism that is WebMD (their top topics this week include penis enlargement). Stamped with the approval of a reviewing doctor, this story is meant to reek of credibility. It certainly reeks, but of something else entirely.

Readers don′t find out until the second page of the story that the data these scientists are analyzing isn′t their own and it wasn′t collected with the purpose of making evaluations about the health implications of trace elements in wine.

The amounts of metals found in these wines are described as being in some cases 300 times those found in fish, but the reporter neglects to mention the fact that the metals in the wine (vanadium, copper, manganese, zinc, nickel, chromium, and lead) are different than those in fish (mainly mercury), and therefore probably have wildly different levels of danger (last time I checked it takes a lot more copper to screw you up than it does mercury).

Throughout the piece the reporter uses the word “contaminate” to describe the presence of the metals in the wine, yet most of those metals are found in nearly everything we eat that comes from a plant and several are found in pretty much every multi-vitamin on the face of the planet.

One of the other highly suspect components of this research, which is not addressed at all by the reporter has to do with the fact that somehow only wines from Italy, Brazil and Argentina have safe levels of metal, meaning they have between 30 and 300 times less of these metals in them than the other wines.

Now I’m not a winemaker or a wine scientist, but other than some basic filtration (which I’m not even sure is capable of removing metals such as these), I’m not aware of any winemaking step or process that specifically removes heavy metals from wine. And as far as I know, grape vines grow in the many of the same types of soil and climate all over the world. So how is it exactly that some country’s wines are so “contaminated” while others aren’t? The fact that this contamination is consistent by country, too, seems utterly preposterous — as if there’s some consistent problem in the entire frigging country?

Take a quick read of the actual research paper, and it’s easy to see that the researchers themselves only tested a single red wine (and Australian Shiraz) and that there is no mention of all these countries’ wines that appear in the WebMD article. None.

I′ll stop my outrage there. Most likely, this is a flawed research study that is being wrongly interpreted by a stupid journalist, and now wine drinkers all over the world are going to be worried that along with their resveratrol, they’re getting a Parkinson’s inducing dose of heavy metals.

If I had to choose between entrusting my life and health to a glass of good red wine or a hack journalist, I know which one I would choose.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

Coffee not only tastes good, it stimulates your brain. History tells us that coffee houses in 17th century England were known for their lively political discussions. HISTORY

I don’t frequent enough coffee houses to know if that tradition of political discussion is still followed, but there is a website you may visit that will stimulate your brain in a political sense, Nanny State.

Just be sure

Original post by Robert

By Joyzelle Davis, Rocky Mountain News

McDonald’s, already the nation’s biggest hamburger chain, is escalating its simmering breakfast battle with Starbucks as it rolls out espresso drinks at all 110 Denver-area locations next week.

McDonald’s is overhauling all of its restaurants in the region to include a McCafe that serves a premium line of iced and hot lattes, cappuccinos and mochas.

Original post by Robert

Phoenix Business Journal - by Puget Sound Business Journal

Starbucks Corp. said it will double its purchases of “fair trade-certified” coffee to 40 million pounds next year.

Officials at the Seattle coffee giant said it will be the largest purchaser of fair-trade coffee in the world.

The announcement was made in conjunction with Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International, which is a

Original post by Robert

Phoenix Business Journal - by Puget Sound Business Journal

Starbucks Corp. said it will double its purchases of “fair trade-certified” coffee to 40 million pounds next year.

Officials at the Seattle coffee giant said it will be the largest purchaser of fair-trade coffee in the world.

The announcement was made in conjunction with Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International, which is a

Original post by Robert

One of my favorite punching bags in the world is the sorry state of California rosé. For some reason, winemakers just don’t seem to be able to produce the beautifully dry, crisp, tart rosés that I have come to expect from southern France, southern Italy, and northern Spain. These mediterranean wines are the benchmark for rosé, and most American wines fall quite short.

Which is why I’m so enthusiastic when I discover pink wines that are made well in this country. And when they’re made of exotic grape varieties, so much the better!

If you gave me three guesses as to which winery in northern California would be most likely to grow Touriga Nacional, I’d probably have ended up with York Creek Vineyards before I ran out of guesses.

The York Creek property is one of the largest and most beautiful parcels of land on the crest of Napa’s Spring Mountain. One hundred twenty-five acres of vineyards are surrounded by another 575 acres of woods and orchards, hosting 24 varieties of native trees whose silhouettes make an appearance on the York Creek wine label. The property mirrors the variety of trees in its vineyard plantings of over 14 different varietals including Cabernet Sauvignon, Petite Sirah, Zinfandel, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc, Pinot Blanc, Carignane, Alicante Bouschet, and Touriga Nacional.

York Creek has been owned since 1968 by Fritz Maytag who purchased the property around the same time he purchased the Anchor Steam Brewing Company here in San Francisco. He always meant to make his own wine there, it just took him a while to get around to it — about 32 years, to be exact.

Maytag is the prodigal son of the Maytag family who decided that he needed to do something instead of appliances or blue cheese with his life. Not that his family ever had any intention of just letting him run the family business. Maytag was encouraged to find his own way in the world without a sense of entitlement. That way included a stint at Stanford as well as a lot of hanging around in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, until the day in 1965 when he fell in love with the Anchor Brewing Company, and decided to save it from going out of business by buying a controlling interest “for the price of a used car.”

Maytag took to brewing like a fish to water, and in the subsequent decades, he has become the Midas of the beverage world. His beer is world-renown and best-selling; his experiments in whiskey and gin have become quick successes. Maytag is a dabbler, a beverage renaissance man if you like, that seems to get it right. From home grown olive oil, to home grown apple brandy, to grappa and port, and now his own wine, Maytag wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the turn of the century village market where farmers eked out an existence from every asset the land provided.

Maytag initially started his winemaking operations in the early Nineties for fun and with the encouragement of his neighbor and friend Cathy Corison, owner and proprietress of Corison Vineyards. In 2000 he moved his operations to a specially designed (by him, of course) winery building across the street from his brewery and made his first commercial vintages. There he continues to serve as winemaker, though now with some help from Tom Holmes, formerly one of the brewers at Anchor Steam who trained as an enologist.

York Creek Vineyards makes a number of excellent wines that I have tasted repeatedly over the years. They are distinctive, well made, unpretentious and often good values. Some of the wines also express what I take to be Maytag’s adventurous spirit for experimentation. I’m quite certain this pretty rosé falls into that camp. Who on earth would have thought of making a rosé in California out of Touriga Nacional, one of the primary red grape varieties that goes into Port and the dry red wines of Portugal?

I don’t know much about the winemaking for this wine, other than what I can guess from what is in the bottle. The grapes were probably harvested ripe-but-not-too-ripe on a cool morning, destemmed, crushed, and then a portion of the fermenting juice was probably bled off from the tank and put into a separate steel tank to finish fermentation on its own.

One of the first wines I fell in love with as a young wine lover was Mateus, a rosé from Portugal that had two important characteristics: it came in a cool shaped bottle, and it was just slightly sweet, not unlike contemporary White Zinfandels — perfect for a beginning wine lover. This wine is quite superior in quality and flavor, but it reminds me fondly of the beginnings of my wine adventures.

Tasting Notes:
Brilliant rose pink in the glass, this wine has a nose of crushed stones, hibiscus, and candied orange peel. In the mouth it is light and smooth with flavors of hibiscus, raspberry, watermelon, and a light bitter earthiness that emerges on the finish. Dry, but not tart, the wine has enough acidity to make it refreshing. A unique and pleasurable rose.

Food Pairing:
I had this wine with cornmeal crust goat cheese pizza with tomatoes and basil, as well as a salad of mixed greens with scallions. It was a particularly nice counterpoint to the scallions, which made the wine more floral in character.

Overall Score: between 8.5 and 9

How Much?: $15

This wine is available for purchase on the Internet.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

Back in the 1980’s and 90’s I invested in a personal hedge fund. At the time there wasn’t any overriding strategy other than perhaps a hedonistic one. I started out with little investments here and there, and one thing led to another. A little trading, some long-term holdings, some quick-turn-around buys. All this over a period of the past 20 years.

In these days the market is in the tank, up and down like a yo-yo, heavily driven by an emotionalism I find too volatile to deal with. But along the way I have been lucky enough to dodge the important bullets and my hedge fund has grown. Now, what should I do about it?

Several cases of La Chapelle Hermitage from Paul Jaboulet, from 1985 and 1989. These have been the house wine for the past 15 or so Christmas dinners. Initial cost was about $20 a bottle. Current appx. street value $150-300 a bottle. But if I sold the remaining cases, how could I tell how an Hermitage will taste at 50 years of age? After all that was the reason, to buy a wine that everyone told me would age for 50 years. I have 30 years to go, which is just about how long I expect to last as well. Position:Hold and Drink

A magnum of the 1960 Vega Sicilia Unico Artist Series, bought a very long time ago for about $100. About now this bottle is going for appx. $1600-2500. I’ll probably keep it and open it when it is 50 years old, which is in two years. It’d also be great for anyone who was born or married in that year. Maybe there is a hedge fund manager who is swimming in dough and was born in 1960? I’m not married to the Vega Sicilia, but seeing as it represents an amount that I would never spend on a bottle of wine, maybe I’ll just open the damn thing for the hell of it. Position:Hold or Sell.

Chateau Mouton-Rothschild. I bought many different years of this wine because I liked to collect the labels, from 1982 to 1990. Now these wines represent a lot of capital, but none of which I really tied up. I think the most I paid for a bottle ( the 1990) was $50. And while I cannot sell them all and buy a Porsche Speedster, it really wouldn’t matter. I don’t want a Porsche Speedster again. I do like the Francis Bacon label, though. It reminds me of the time I did a tasting in Bordeaux at a famous negociant. They showed us a wall of first growths and told us how many millions of dollars it was worth. They neglected to say the triptych of Bacon’s that they had in the hallway leading to the wine vaults was worth about $50 million. Position:Hold for Now.

I’ve had my flirtations with Super Tuscans over the years. There still is a good stash of Sassicaia from 1979 to 1990 in my portfolio. The most I ever paid for a bottle was about $70.00. I remember actually selling the 1968 for about $28 to my clients. I had found a cache of the first bottling in a cellar in Florence in the early 1980’s. It wasn’t an easy sell. So I tended to keep the early wines, drinking a few here and there. I’m not as interested in Sassicaia these days (when they go for about $200), but the older ones still have a sense of place and lack of manipulation. Position:Hold or Drink.

I also dabbled with a little Solaia, the 1997. I am not sure if Doc Micro-Ox or if Miss Perverse Osmosis infected this wine. I traded it for 3 bottles of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Riserva. Now it has a street value of about $400.Position: Sell.

A few years ago I traded a bottle of Mouton, a bottle of Sassicaia and a bottle of Tignanello for a Hasty-Bake wood barbeque grill. Now that was one of my better trades.

Back in the early 1990’s I walked into a river-bottom liquor store and they had 1988 Bruno Giacosa Barbaresco for $14.99. I bought all they had (and got a 10% discount). Today that wine is easily worth $150. So delicious and now just about ready. Position: Drink what is left. With pleasure.

Lastly, I bought a bunch of Port, thinking 1990-1994 would be good wines to drink when they are 20 years old. The oldest of that bunch are starting to get close. I am particularly fond of Quinta Vesuvio for several reasons. It was one of the quintas farthest up the Douro. I had probably the best bacala I have ever had there. And during crush one year we pressed the grapes, by our feet, in the ancient lagars. Truly a transcendental experience. Were talking Old-World, Old-School stuff here. Not some snotty California wine-camp-crush stuff. The real deal. So I love my Port and my hedge fund portfolio is weighted well in these long term holdings. Position: Hold.

There’s a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth in these days. It seems a lot of people are poorer on paper than they were a month ago. But really how poor are you, if your closet if filled with all these long-term high-return wines? I have been visiting my wine closet a bit more lately, if for no reason other than to reassure myself that even though I will need to work quite a few years more, there will be a continuous supply of great wine, bought at low prices, available for those lean years ahead.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

A little less than five years ago when I started this blog, I naively thought that I might try to do something different from all those big wine critics. They were only telling part of the story, I said to myself, but I was going to tell the whole thing. I wasn’t going to pull the punches that I felt everyone else was avoiding. I decided I was going to write negative wine reviews — just what the world needed. Or so I thought.

I think my pioneering attitude lasted about six weeks, after which I was left with a (now) blindingly obvious set of revelations:

1. There was so much mediocre wine out there in the world that lukewarm or negative reviews could easily take up the majority of my writing time.

2. Writing negative reviews is about as fun as completing the writing comprehension section of the SAT.

3. People mostly want to know which wines are great much more than they want to know which wines to avoid.

Since those early days, I’ve developed a more nuanced point of view on the subject, but I hadn’t thought about it recently (nor had to defend that point of view) until I was politely “cornered” at the recent Wine Bloggers Conference and asked to publicly state, and defend, my position.

The question of whether negative wine reviews benefit anyone does not clearly resolve into black and white, which means it’s something that was certainly worth talking about, and on reflection, writing about.

As readers will probably recognize, I almost never write negative reviews here on Vinography. The few times I have were situations where I felt like there was an honestly useful, even more specifically educational, value in writing such a review. They are few and far between.

I don′t write negative reviews of wines because I don′t think that they are particularly meaningful or relevant for another set of reasons in addition to those listed above:

a. Many times, I don′t necessarily know that the bottle I happen to be reviewing isn′t simply just a bit off — whether from a fault that I am not detecting or identifying or simply due to bottle variation of some sort or another.

b. A bad review is quite damaging, because it is often read as a condemnation of the winery itself (despite any care or attention put to the contrary by the author) even though the particular wine in question could be part of a portfolio of truly stellar wines.

c. Likewise, bad reviews are often read (and written by irresponsible critics) as being absolute and categorical judgements about a winery, when in fact they are mere evaluations of a specific wine in a specific vintage. That particular wine could have been great the year before, or it could get great the next year. But bad reviews hang around in the minds of consumers like skeletons in the closet, much longer than they should.

d. Bad reviews also hang around in the minds of winemakers and winery owners a lot longer than they should. Like it or not, anyone who seriously attempts to write consistently about wine in a critical fashion has a symbiotic (or as Jancis Robinson would put it, a parasitic) relationship with the wine industry. Bad reviews burn bridges in ways that make it difficult for the writer to ply their craft.

As readers know, when I review an individual wine, I spend a lot of time (and words) in the process. To do so, only to pan a wine, would be a waste of my time and the readers for all the reasons stated above.

There are a couple of slight exceptions to this rule, however, when it comes to my coverage of large categories of wine at major public or trade tastings or my reviews of the entire portfolio of wines by a single producer. In those situations I often (but not always) include the scores of the wines that fall the lowest on my scale. In the case of large public tastings, I am not writing tasting notes or any other kinds of notes about the wines, only offering their scores relative to a much larger group of wines. In the case of a producer, I am including that wine in a group that includes wines I think are excellent as well (otherwise I wouldn′t write the review), so I believe there is enough context to mitigate my negative assessment of the wine.

These exceptions lead me to the conclusion, however, that if I was going to attempt in any way to offer a comprehensive set of criticisms about any particular category of wine, that I might indeed write negative reviews. For instance, if I ever happened to be able to attend the En Primeur tasting of top Bordeaux Chateaux in the Spring, my goal would be to provide readers with my reviews and scores for every single wine, and that comprehensive coverage would by necessity have to include those wines which I did not care for.

I rarely find myself in a position with the time or the opportunity to be so comprehensive in my coverage of any type or showing of wine, however.

Nonetheless, the fact that such a situation might exist, certainly forces me, in answering the question that titles this post, to not only concede that there certainly could be a point to negative wine reviews in certain situations, but also to admit that my position on the subject isn’t quite as strong as I might believe.

For instance, if I ever got into the habit of publishing every tasting note I ever made (hard to imagine given the effort of doing so at the moment) I might consider including the bad ones as well.

But I suppose I’m lucky that I don′t have to suffer through that at the moment. Instead, I choose to take the time that I do in order to write carefully and passionately about individual wines that I love. Life is too short to drink bad wine, and it’s also too short to write 500 words about a wine only to recommend that no one should buy it.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola